Ask people who don’t live in Connecticut to give you their impressions of the state, and they may talk about southeast Connecticut’s casinos, Yale University or the castles of Fairfield County’s “gold coast.” Chances are they won’t talk about one of America’s last great places.

But that’s what The Nature Conservancy called the lower Connecticut River’s tidelands, back in 1993, when it identified 40 “Last Great Places” – such as Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, the Great Salt Lake’s shorelands and the grasslands of Colorado’s San Luis Valley – in the western hemisphere.

The Conservancy’s list was intended not simply to call attention to those remarkable spots but also to the fact that each was, in some respect, endangered. The Connecticut tidelands are a remarkably diverse ecosystem and home to many rare species, but they were also threatened by developmental pressures and pollution.

When Jim Smith wrote “We’re All Downstream from Someone” with C. Ben Tyson and Thomas E. Worthley in 1999, the federal government had just named the Connecticut a National Heritage River. Several towns within the watershed were collaborating with the University of Connecticut Cooperative Extension System, the Sylvio O. Conte U.S. National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, and the Connecticut Chapter of the Nature Conservancy to study the watershed of the Eightmile River, one of the lower Connecticut’s important tributaries, and to educate residents about how to protect it.

“We’re All Downstream From Someone” helped raise awareness, and in 2008 federal legislation designated the Eightmile and its watershed a Wild and Scenic River, one of 11,000+ protected rivers in the United States.

Click on the link at left to read "We're All Downstream from Someone" from the Fall 1999 issue of Connecticut Woodlands magazine.